The entire point of hosting a webinar is to inform and educate your audience about something you know will help them. While you will likely seek to answer questions before they’re asked, using your knowledge of your audience, you will probably miss some things your audience needs to know. This is the obvious reason why a Q & A session is a good idea during your webinars. But, besides that, there are many other benefits to having an open mic Q & A session.

  • Improves Audience Engagement – Sometimes webinars are really boring, even if the information itself is great. It’s hard for people to pay attention to a computer screen without any interaction. Looking forward to the Q & A portion, and getting a chance at the mic, will give them encouragement to pay attention and to listen to the entire presentation.
  • Clarifies Your Points – When you have a Q & A session, you can also use each question as a way to clarify the points you wanted to make during the event. Even if you know that you answered a particular question during the event, don’t say so – just answer it and know that it will drive the points home for your audience.
  • Humanizes the Event – Webinars can be monotonous sometimes, but if you open up the mic it will get your attendees excited to talk to you and will make you seem more human along with the event. It also ensures the audience that it’s not an auto-replay event.
  • Reinforces Your Message – During the event, you likely have a particular message you want to give to your audience. Look at open mic time as a way to reinforce that message and use every single question as a way to do so.
  • Builds Your Expertise – When you answer questions on the fly, it is more proof that you’re the expert you are marketing yourself as. If you were just regurgitating information, it would be very difficult for you to answer questions.
  • Helps You Improve Future Presentations – When you get questions, have someone take them down to help you improve the next presentation. Even if you think you answered something during the presentation, you can always clarify the information better.
  • Pumps Up Your Audience – A live Q & A open mic session will invigorate your audience in a way that few other activities can. They’ll feel included, listened to, and understood like almost nothing else can achieve.
  • Gives You Opportunity to Promote – You want to be careful about promoting during your webinar, but you can easily promote during your answers to questions. If someone asks a question that can better be answered by a product you have, answer some of it, then direct them with a link to the product.

Be sure to tell your audience at the beginning and at various points during your event that you will have a Q & A session after the main content. Let them know that you’ll open up the mics so they can ask questions and when that will be done. That way, they can write down their questions as they come up during the event and hear the entire presentation before they ask their question.

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